The Miro 2.5 series has been a total pain in the ass--I'm not going to lie. Not only has it infuriated a number of users, but it's been like a Sysaphusian struggle for the team.

Right now there are 3 developers (Ben, Luc and myself) and 1 QA person (Janet) that work on Miro fulltime. Then we have a large community of testers, translators, and a handful of people who send in patches to fix the problems that irk them most. Even with this large community, the majority of the development, testing and support is done by 4 people.

In the last three months, Janet's house was hit by lightning frying a bunch of her testing machines; I bought a house and moved (along with the build boxes); Ben went on vacation for a month; Luc bought an apartment, moved, and then had his Internet connection totally hosed for a month; I had unforeseen medical problems (that I don't really want to talk about), that resulted in me being offline for the last two weeks; and our ssl certificates expired.

This week is the first time since the beginning of August when we've had all 4 of us working.

We've been trying so hard to get a much-needed 2.5.3 release out. It has a slew of fixes that should alleviate an array of problems that users have been experiencing. We're finally on the verge of the release. I hope it'll happen today or tomorrow.

I really appreciate the patience many of you have had with us as we scrambled to do the impossible over the last couple of months. I really wish it could have happened differently, but it's as if the forces of nature were completely against us.

Though 2.5.3 should fix a variety of issues, we're working on re-architecting some portions of Miro that aren't working well with the database changes we made in Miro 2.5. On top of that, we're working on subtitle support, extensions, and continuing to make Miro a better experience for a larger group of people. Some/most/all of this will show up in Miro 2.6 and 2.7, hopefully in the next few months.

note

I wasn't on the call for 10/7/2009, so I don't have notes for that day.

minutes

Will:

• Planning to push 2.5.3 out.

• Planning to keep working on extracting binary kit stuff.

• Then get miro working on Karmic Koala.

• Then moving libtorrent out of portable.

• Will be in Providence, RI from October 23rd through 26th.

Luc:

• Continuing work on subtitle work.

• Perian doesn't support subtitles in subfolders. Luc is looking into fixing Perian and then sending a patch upstream.

• Luc is going to start looking into VLC support next.

Ben:

• Planning to work on 12101. One of the theories is that when torrents are downloading, Miro is doing a lot of disk thrashing.

• Remove torrent metadata from the updates.

• Tweak status so that we only persist to disk every now and then.

• Plans to work on bug 12229.

• It's difficult to figure out how many people are affected by 12101.

Paul:

• Working on Miro Community 0.8 release. It's coming along nicely.

Janet:

• Tested Miro Community and Miro 2.5 branch builds.

• Working on testing plans for Miro Community post 0.8 release.

2.5.3 status:

• Talked about 12277 and 12276 and where we're going with that plan.

• Hopefully we'll get it out today or tomorrow.

bugzilla

• 8 bugs created

• 1 bug marked DUPLICATE

• 4 bugs marked FIXED

• 2 bugs marked WORKSFORME

• 1 bug marked WONTFIX

minutes

Minutes for this morning's call:

Janet:

• Has gone through all of the tests on Windows XP for 2.5.3 rc1.

• Working on testing Miro on OSX.

• 2.5.3 rc1 is looking good so far.

Luc:

• Worked on 12212 and should have it fixed tomorrow.

• Worked on subtitle ui--it's coming along nicely.

• It's hard to determine which subtitle thing is which language which makes it hard to allow users to choose a default subtitle language.

• Worked on external .srt subtitle handling.

• Perian doesn't support external .srt for movie containers it doesn't open by itself (mp4, quicktime, ogg, ...). Luc's running into problems with that and is trying to talk to the Perian developers.

• VLC handles everything created so far just fine. Luc's tossing around ditching Quicktime/Perian for VLC. (ed note: I think I summarized that right--but I could be completely mistaken about what Luc is tossing around.)

• Will continue doing subtitle work in a subtitle branch that'll eventually get pushed to g.p.o.

Ben:

• Hopped on the call to say hi.

Will:

• Worked on 2.5.3 bugs, put out a rc1 release.

• Working on redoing release process, scripts and infrastructure to make releases easier and cleaner with git.

Paul:

• Working on Miro Community--almost done with version 1.0.

• Working on unit tests.

kickstarter

We achieved the $1000 goal in large part to a couple of key donations. Thank you!

bugzilla

• 21 bugs created

• 7 bugs marked FIXED

• 1 bug marked DUPLICATE

• 8 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

• 2 bugs marked INVALID

• 1 bug marked WONTFIX

minutes

Minutes for this morning's call:

Luc:

• Working on fixing problems with 10.6 build environment and getting Miro working on 10.6.

• Working on subtitles. (Please help us fund this!)

• Having issues with .srt files rendering with Perian and 10.6.

• Snow Leopard support is targeted for 2.5.3.

• Talked about subtitle implementation specifics.

Will:

• Working on trying to get 2.5.3 out.

• Working on 12101.

Janet:

• Testing fixes targeted for 2.5.3.

• Working on Miro Community testing. Planning testing and manual testing.

• Suggested we build a pre-rollout/pre-demo checkoff list for testing.

Paul:

• Worked on Miro Community and it's almost at the 1.0 point.

• Miro Community still needs polish, documentation, testing plans...

• Two sites are live now.

• There are a bunch of sites on deck.

kickstarter

Subtitles project on kickstarter has 24 backers for $494. We're hoping it clears $1000 by the end of the month--8 days to go.

bugzilla

• 19 bugs created

• 4 bugs marked FIXED

• 3 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 1 bug marked WONTFIX

• 2 bugs marked WORKSFORME

Got a comment on a post about a conference call today that I'm a "top 100 blog" in Python. I'm not sure what the selection criteria was, but it looked legit-ish. Added their seal and link to the sidebar for now.

summary

Every Wednesday morning we have a conference call that we call the "dev call". This has been happening for years. Mostly we use it as a place to schedule upcoming development, talk with each other about problems we're working on, and come up to speed on where we're all at.

I occasionally take minutes when someone isn't on the dev call. I'm experimenting with posting the minutes on this blog for the next month. If it turns out to be useful, I'll keep doing it. Otherwise I'll stop.

minutes

Minutes for this morning's call:

Luc:

• working on getting Miro working with Snow Leopard.

• cleaning up the sandbox code.

• it'll make things much easier when we drop support for 10.4--but that's far in the future still. (15% of OSX users are using 10.4 according to Miro Guide stats.)

• then we talked about the costs of supporting 10.4 users.

Will:

• worked on Miro 2.5.3 and 2.6 all week.

• talked about bug status for 12028, 12150, 12166, 12101, and 12108.

• talked about how we're building libtorrent and how we should bump it to the binary kit which will definitely alleviate some issues and possibly alleviate others because we're not really building it "right" in the first place.

• made changes to Planet Miro and took over curating.

Janet:

• got her machine back which was fried by lightning in August.

• working through reworking her test environments.

• testing the Miro 2.5 nightly that Will built.

Paul:

• working on Miro Community.

• almost done with merging "users" and "authors". should get resolved in the near future.

• continuing to implement styling stuff from Morgan.

kickstarter

Subtitles project on kickstarter has 12 backers for $191. We're hoping it clears $1000 by the end of the month.

bugzilla

Rough Bugzilla stats:

• 16 bugs created

• 8 bugs marked FIXED

• 4 bugs marked as DUPLICATE

I appointed myself Planet Miro curator this morning. I also made some changes:

• added new related links

• added an about page

• added Uwe Hermann's Miro tagged feed

• added Open Video Alliance feed

Going forward, I'll blog about Planet updates.

Who else should be on Planet Miro? We're interested in getting content and updates from anyone who contributes to Miro, Miro Guide, Miro Community, Open Video, or any of the other endeavors that we're working on.

If there are blogs or people you know of whose work should be synidcated on Planet Miro, email me to let me know.

As of September 11th, there are only 10 people in the world who are interested in subtitle support in Miro enough to contribute to it. Is that right? Were we completely mistaken in thinking that users want subtitle support?

If subtitle support in Miro is important to you, take the time to contribute now. If you live in the United States, donations/contributions are tax-deductible because PCF is a 501c3 non-profit company.

Also, help us get the word out. Write about it on your blog, dent it, digg it, reddit it, ... Help us make it happen. Help us help you.

I use a four space indent which causes problems when indenting if statements that span multiple lines. For example:

if (a
    and b
    and c):
    if_block_here

The problem is caused because if is two characters and therefore if ( is four characters--which matches the four space indent. I end up with code where I can't easily distinguish if statement from the if block.

After talking about it with Paul and Chris and working out what the specifics of the problem are, I decided to use double parens. The above with double-parens looks like this:

if ((a
     and b
     and c)):
    if_block_here

That satisfies PEP-8, doesn't change the semantics, and fixes my problem. It is a little goofy to use double parens, but it's a good enough fix until I get around to fiddling with the code that does automatic indentation in python-mode.

I'd be interested in other ideas that don't involve using \ at the end of lines if they're out there.